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 Julia Kristeva
ON THE MELANCHOLIC IMAGINARY
Melancholy is amorous passion's sombre lining. A sorrowful pleasure, thislugubrious intoxication constitutes the banal background from which our idealsor euphoria break away as much as that fleeting lucidity which breaks the tranceentwining two people together. Conscious that we are destined to lose our loves,we are perhaps even more grieved to notice in our lover the shadow of a lovedobject, already lost. Depression is the hidden face of Narcissus: thatcountenance which - although it will carry him off into death - remainsunperceived by him as, marvelling, he contemplates himself in a mirage. Inspeaking of depression, we are led once again into the swampy regions of theNarcissus myth. This time, however, we shall not be concentrating on itsbrilliant and fragile amorous idealization. On the contrary, we shall beconcerned with the shadow cast over the fragile ego, barely dissociable from theother: a shadow cast, precisely, by the loss of this necessary other - a shadow of despair.Rather than seeking the meaning of despair (which is evident or metaphysical),let us acknowledge that there is no meaning aside from despair. The child-kingbecomes irremediably sad before uttering his first words. It is being separatedfrom his mother, despairingly, with no going back, that prompts his attempts torecuperate her, along with other objects, in his imagination and, later, in words.The semiology interested in the degree zero of symbolism is unfailingly led topose questions to itself not only about the amorous state but also about itssombre corollary- melancholy. This entails recognizing, in the same movement,that no writing exists that is not amorous, nor can there be an imagination that isnot, manifestly or secretly, melancholic.Nevertheless, melancholy is not French. Protestantism's rigour or ChristianOrthodoxy's matriarchal weight appear more sympathetic companions to thebereaved individual - when they do not invite him to a morose revelry. For theCatholic west, sadness is a sin and the wretched citizens of the 'abode of woe' areplaced by Dante in the circles of hell
(The Inferno,
Canto III). Although Frenchmedievalism presents us with delicately perceived portrayals of sorrow, theGallic tone, renascent and enlightened, belongs more to jest than to nihilism.Here Rousseau and Nerval cut sad - and exceptional - figures.In different ways according to the religious climate, we might say thatmelancholy is affirmed in religious doubt. There is nothing sadder than a deadGod, and Dostoevsky himself was to be troubled by the distressing image of thedead Christ in Holbein's painting, counterposed as it is to the 'truth of theresurrection'. Particularly propitious to this black, melancholic humour are
5
new formations
NUMBER 3 WINTER 1987
 
those epochs which witness the collapse of religious and political ideals: theepochs of crisis. An unemployed worker is, admittedly, less suicidal than a jiltedwoman. In times of crisis, however, melancholy imposes itself, lays down itsarchaeology, produces its representations and its knowledge. Certainly,melancholy in writing has little to do with the clinical stupor of melancholia(even if the two bear the same name in French). Beyond the terminologicalconfusion maintained until now - what is a melancholia? what is a depression? -we find ourselves faced with an enigmatic chiasmus that will continue topreoccupy us. If loss, mourning, and absence set the imaginary act in motionand permanently fuel it as much as they menace and undermine it, it is alsoundeniable that the fetish of the work of art is erected in disavowal of thismobilizing affliction. The artist: melancholy's most intimate witness and thefiercest fighter against the symbolic abdication enveloping him - until deathstrikes and suicide imposes its triumphant conclusion upon the void of the lostobject . . .
 Melancholia
here designates the clinical symptomatology of inhibition andasymbolia that an individual displays sporadically or chronically, often inalternation with the so-called manic phase of exultation. These two phenomena(dejection-exultation), in less marked forms and in more frequent alternation,constitute the
depressive
temperament of the neurotic. While recognizing thetwo phenomena to be different, Freudian theory detects in both the sameimpossible mourning of the 'maternal' object. Question: what paternal failingmakes it impossible? Or what biological fragility? Melancholia - to take up thegeneric term again after distinguishing the psychotic and neurotic symptomatologies- has the considerable advantage of situating the analyst's interrogation at theintersection of the biological and the symbolic. Parallel series? Consecutivesequences? Or aleatory intersection requiring specification? Or, again, anotherrelation to be invented?
THE DEPRESSIVE: HATING OR HURT?
According to classical psychoanalytic theory (Abraham, Freud, Klein),
1
depression, like mourning, hides an aggressivity against the lost object andthereby reveals the ambivalence on the part of the mourner with respect to theobject of his mourning. 'I love him/her', the depressive seems to say about a lostbeing or object, 'but, even more, I hate him/her; because I love him/her, inorder not to lose him/her, I install him/her in myself; but because I hatehim/her, this other in myself is a bad ego, I am bad, worthless, I am destroyingmyself.' So self-accusation becomes an accusation against the other and self-annihilation the tragic disguising of another's massacre. Such a logicpresupposes, it is suggested, a severe super-ego and a complex dialectic of idealization and devalorization, both of oneself and the other: the set of thesemechanisms is based upon the mechanism of 
identification.
For it is indeed anidentification with the loved/hated other - through incorporation, introjection,projection - that is effected by the taking into myself of an ideal, sublime, partor trait of the other. This becomes my necessary and tyrannical judge. Theanalysis of depression is, in consequence, conducted through a making manifest
6 NEW FORMATIONS
 
of the fact that the self-reproach is a hatred directed against the other and, nodoubt, the bearer of an unsuspected sexual desire. It is understandable that suchan accession of hatred in the transference carries its own risks for the analysandas well as for the analyst, and that the treatment of depression (even of thatidentified as neurotic) risks schizoid fragmentation.With the treatment of narcissistic personalities, however, modern analysts (E.Jacobson, among others
2
) have been led to comprehend a different modalityof depression. Far from being a dissimulated assault upon another - imagined tobe hostile because frustrating - sorrow would be the signalling of an incomplete,empty, and wounded primitive ego. Such a person considers himself to be notinjured but stricken by a fundamental lack, by a congenital deficiency. His grief hides neither the guilt nor the failure of a secretly hatched vengeance against theambivalent object. Rather, his sorrow could be the most archaic expression of anarcissistic wound, impossible to symbolize or name, and too precocious for anyexterior agent (subject or object) to be correlated to it. For this type of narcissistic depressive, sorrow is, in reality, his only object. More exactly, itconstitutes a substitute object to which he clings, cultivating and cherishing it,for lack of any other. In this context, suicide is not a camouflaged act of war buta reuniting with sorrow and, beyond it, with that impossible love, neverattained, always elsewhere. Such are the promises of the void, of death . . .
IS MOOD A LANGUAGE?
Sorrow is the fundamental mood characterizing depression and even if maniceuphoria alternates with it in the bipolar forms of this state, grief is the principalmanifestation betraying the sufferer. Sorrow leads us into the enigmatic domainof 
affects
such as anxiety, fear, or joy.
3
Irreducible to its verbal or semiologicalexpressions, sorrow (like every affect) is the
psychical representation of displacements of psychical energy
provoked by external or internal traumas. Theexact status of these psychical representatives of energy-displacements remains,in the present state of psychoanalytic and semiological theories, very imprecise.No conceptual framework in the existing sciences (linguistics, in particular) hasproved adequate for understanding this apparently very rudimentary representation, pre-sign and pre-language. The mood 'sorrow', set off by an excitation,tension, or energy-conflict in a psychosomatic organism, is not a
specific
response to what sets it off (I am not sad as a response or as a sign to X and onlyX). Mood is a 'generalized transference' (E. Jacobson) that marks
all
behaviourand all sign-systems (from motility to elocution and to ideation) without beingidentical to them or causing their disorganization. There are grounds forthinking that what is at play here is an archaic
energy-signal,
of phylogeneticheritage, which in the psychical space of the human being is
immediately
takeninto charge by verbal representation and consciousness. Nevertheless, thistaking into charge is not of the order of the cathexes said by Freud to be'bound', admitting of verbalization, association, displacement. We might saythat the representations proper to affects, and notably sadness, are
fluctuating
energy-traces. Too unstable to coagulate into signs, verbal or otherwise,activated by the primary processes of displacement and condensation, but
ON THE MELANCHOLIC IMAGINARY 7
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